I'm sure most of this stuff isn't really very good (quality, capacity). But can anyone doubt that a tablet-controlled, GPS enabled, Android powered quadcopter with video camera for around £30 is just around the corner?

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

One way to accomplish [trading energy for computation] quickly (before the old system completely fails) is to decentralize production with networked resilient communities. At that point, the global economy would be 98% information and all basic needs would be provided for locally. Information only economies built on a base of self-sufficiency can be as different from capitalism as capitalism is from feudalism.

Tuesday, October 02, 2012

Not only interesting in its own right, but I'm quite struck by the fact that this comes from a Chinese university.

We've
long become used to the fact that the West has lost much of its earlier
technical leadership over China. But there's still an assumption that
we have the edge in "creative play" of the kind that will stimulate the
next generation of products and applications.

This video looks
awfully like "creative play" to me. And, frankly, while I've thought a
lot about drones over the last couple of years, I hadn't thought of the application of allowing someone in a wheel-chair to inspect a some flowers.

Monday, October 01, 2012

Obama terrorizes innocent Pakistanis on an almost daily basis.
The drone war he is waging in North Waziristan isn't "precise" or
"surgical" as he would have Americans believe. It kills hundreds of
innocents, including children. And for thousands of more innocents who
live in the targeted communities, the drone war makes their lives into a
nightmare worthy of dystopian novels. People are always afraid.
Women cower in their homes. Children are kept out of school. The stress
they endure gives them psychiatric disorders. Men are driven crazy by
an inability to sleep as drones buzz overhead 24 hours a day, a deadly
strike possible at any moment. At worst, this policy creates more
terrorists than it kills; at best, America is ruining the lives
of thousands of innocent people and killing hundreds of innocents for a
small increase in safety from terrorists. It is a cowardly, immoral, and
illegal policy, deliberately cloaked in opportunistic secrecy. And
Democrats who believe that it is the most moral of all responsible
policy alternatives are as misinformed and blinded by partisanship as
any conservative ideologue.

Obama established one of the most
reckless precedents imaginable: that any president can secretly order
and oversee the extrajudicial killing of American citizens. Obama's kill
list transgresses against the Constitution as egregiously as anything
George W. Bush ever did. It is as radical an invocation of executive
power as anything Dick Cheney championed. The fact that the Democrats
rebelled against those men before enthusiastically supporting Obama is
hackery every bit as blatant and shameful as anything any talk radio
host has done.

Contrary to his own previously stated understanding
of what the Constitution and the War Powers Resolution demand,
President Obama committed U.S. forces to war in Libya without
Congressional approval, despite the lack of anything like an imminent
threat to national security.